I am now sitting in the Mombasa airport. It is 1:15am. The place is completely deserted. In order to get back into the waiting area I have had to wake up two people from what looked like a very lovely rest. Security guards all around are sleeping, slouched back in plastic chairs, caps placed over their faces, heads cocked in unnatural positions. There is music faintly playing from the other side of the large room and a crow cawing above. The loudest noise is blaring in front of me. I plopped myself down in a chair right in front of the television. In a room lined with glass walled shops which are filled with over produced trinkets and duty free liquor, in the middle of wood carved elephants, tusker t shirts, cloth dolls, beaded bracelets and Old Monk rum sits 42 inches of flat screen tragedy. Al Jazeera is on and with every change of the story I want to weep even more. Bombings, massacres, famine, disease, drug overdoses, riots, protests, economic failure. It’s all so overwhelming. There are images on the screen of the famine in Somalia and the refugees pouring into Ethiopia and Kenya and I can’t help but notice that they look just like images I have in the photography books sitting on my shelf in North Carolina right now. Images from decades ago immortalized on the pages from Sebastiao Salgado and James Nachtwey and others. The same sunken faces and hollowed eyes. Mothers unable to feed their children, children too weak to feed themselves. People who have walked for days only to have to wait outside already overflowing camps. This has all happened before. Right there. And the medium that I love so much, the one that I claim has the power to change, well what has it changed? Is this really the powerful tool that I claim it is? Whats the point?
I find my career choice to be similar, in a way, to medicine or social work. You go into fields like this because you want to see something change. Doctors want to do away with disease or pain. Social workers long for stable, safe homes for kids. I want to see an end to the injustices I see all around. But the truth is, if we all got what we wanted we would all be out of a job. Our want would no longer exist. What would we fill our time with then?
During a debate in our Swahili class about whether war is ever justifiable (a difficult enough subject in english and we had to do it in swahili), a girl arguing that was can be justified finished a rant with "we need to be realistic about reality." In a way she is right. It is childish and idealistic of me to think that war will ever not exist. In a way that attitide feels like she has given up. But maybe she and I just have different realities.
These are thoughts I struggle with and will likely continue to struggle with daily as I devote my life’s work to photography. Ultimately I know that we need to keep working. Because if I throw my hands up in the air now and think that if this is happening now so it’ll happen again so what’s the point in fighting against it I’ve failed. Many photographers have come before me. And said all of this better than I can when I’ve been up for 20 hours. I will photograph to make others see and feel and pay attention to what is going on. I will continue to work because if I can create photographs that make just one person want to stand up and work against violence and injustice then I will have done some good here.
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